Minarchists argue that the state has no authority to use its monopoly of force to interfere with free transactions between people, and see the state's sole responsibility as ensuring that contracts between private individuals and property are protected, through a system of law courts and enforcement. Minarchists generally believe a laissez-faire approach to the economy will most likely lead to economic prosperity.

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Some minarchists argue that a state is inevitable.[4] Another common justification is that private defense and court firms would tend to show bias, unevenly representing the interests of paying clients.[5]Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia argued that a night watchman state provides a framework that allows for any political system that respects fundamental individual rights.[6]

Ayn Rand is notable for her opposition to taxation, while also holding that the elimination of taxation in a society should occur gradually.[7]

Murray Rothbard argued that all government services, including defense, are inefficient because they lack a market-based pricing mechanism regulated by the voluntary decisions of consumers purchasing services that fulfill their highest-priority needs and by investors seeking the most profitable enterprises to invest in.[10] Therefore, the state's monopoly on the use of force is a violation of natural rights.[10] He wrote, "The defense function is the one reserved most jealously by the State.[10] It is vital to the State's existence, for on its monopoly of force depends its ability to extract taxes from the citizens. If citizens were permitted privately owned courts and armies, then they would possess the means to defend themselves against invasive acts by the government as well as by private individuals."[10] In his book Power and Market, he argued that geographically large minarchist states are indifferent from a unified minarchist world monopoly government.[11] Rothbard wrote that governments were not inevitable, noting that it often took hundreds of years for aristocrats to set up a state out of anarchy.[12] He also argued that if a minimal state allows individuals to freely secede from the current jurisdiction to join a competing jurisdiction, then it does not by definition constitute a state.[13]

Linda & Morris Tannehill argue that no coercive monopoly of force can arise on a free market and that a government's citizenry cannot desert them in favor of a competent protection and defense agency.[14]

^Murray Rothbard. Power and Market: Defense services on the Free Market. p. 1051. It is all the more curious, incidentally, that while laissez-faireists should by the logic of their position, be ardent believers in a single, unified world government, so that no one will live in a state of “anarchy” in relation to anyone else, they almost never are.

^Murray Rothbard. Power and Market: Defense services on the Free Market. p. 1054. In the purely free-market society, a would-be criminal police or judiciary would find it very difficult to take power, since there would be no organized State apparatus to seize and use as the instrumentality of command. To create such an instrumentality de novo is very difficult, and, indeed, almost impossible; historically, it took State rulers centuries to establish a functioning State apparatus. Furthermore, the purely free-market, stateless society would contain within itself a system of built-in “checks and balances” that would make it almost impossible for such organized crime to succeed.